It will be said, and will not be particu larly wrong, that this week's budget is the product of a sick man. The truth begins at three o’clock in the morning in the master bedroom of a ranking St. John’s home, January of 1979. John Crosbie is scared, his left hand anxiously examining what feels like the cool, thick arm of a dead stranger.By Roy MacGregor14 min

In physical terms, the crowd forming in Judy Sarick’s Children’s Book Store on Saturday morning was no more than a spit away from the wellheeled group milling through Hazelton Lanes, Toronto’s tony shopping complex. But there all closeness ended.By Ann Johnston8 min

On an afternoon when seemingly all of Quebec’s Eastern Townships were lying shrouded and primordial under the kind of rain best left to literature, John Glassco poured a beer. Hearing about the beer several days later, Jim Polk, a friend of Glassco’s and an editor at Toronto’s House of Anansi Press, moaned: “God no, he’s becoming Canadian.”By Wayne Clark8 min

Though I agree with the drift of Anthony Whittingham’s piece A Nightmare in Search of a Dream (Nov. 19) on the recent purchase of Reed Paper’s Dryden mill by Great Lakes Forest Products, I'm a little anxious about being quoted as saying that it’s the ideal solution, that jobs are now secured and that the environmental problem is solved.

While the latest exiles in an age of chemicals, the 220,000 residents of Mississauga, Ontario, awaited permission to return to their homes last month; a machine in a van was monitoring the nightmare. A highly praised Canadian invention called the TAGA 3000, it told scientists exactly how much deadly chlorine gas was leaking from the derailed and ruptured chlorine tanker.By Wayne Clark, Robert Plaskin5 min

It began as a real Hollywood fairy tale for Yvette Mimieux. At 17 she was “discovered” by a talent scout and whisked off to the sound stages of MGM studios. Her first film was the 1960 version of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and 20 years later she’s back in another sci-fi adventure The Black Hole.By Marsha Boulton5 min

Gerald Regan, 50, Liberal premier of Nova Scotia 1970 to 1978 and since then leader of the Opposition, admits he’s "considering” a run at the federal leadership, while at the same time insisting he has not yet made up his mind. He says he believes that it would be useful to have a candidate “who has a feel for the Atlantic region and could speak for its interests at the convention."By Thomas Hopkins5 min

San Antonio, says Fred Burtner, president of the Chamber of Commerce, is “the largest undiscovered city in the country.” But last week this fast-growing southwestern Texas metropolis (population, 1,021,400) was on the map with a vengeance after the arrival in the dead of night of the shah of Iran and, in his trail, an international assembly of reporters and cameramen.By Ian Urquhart5 min

She tells it as an amusing anecdote: “I must have been 12 or 13 when I blindly blundered into the bathroom where my young cousin, a girl maybe two or three years old, was being bathed. I opened the door and there were all the doting aunts standing around and I let out a yell and said, ‘She doesn’t have a tail!’And one of the aunts said, ‘Didn’t you know?’ I didn’t.By David Weinberger4 min

Every country needs heroes. I grew up devouring stories of the French and English explorers. Champlain once strode through our part of the country, southern Ontario, and it was easy to imagine his lingering presence. My grandfather would travel miles to see and hear Sir Wilfrid Laurier.By Harry J. Boyle4 min

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